Tony Battaglia use's a snap pitch app on his cell phone to video his 9 year-old son Tony, a Moosic Little League pitcher as his daughter Sophia, 12, catches. Butch Comegys / Staff Photographer Story by Horvath Tony Battaglia use's a snap pitch app on his cell phone to video his 9 year-old son Tony, a Moosic Little League pitcher as his daughter Sophia, 12, catches. Butch Comegys / Staff Photographer Story by Horvath Tony Battaglia use's a snap pitch app on his cell phone to video his 9 year-old son Tony, a Moosic Little League pitcher as his daughter Sophia, 12, catches. Butch Comegys / Staff Photographer Story by Horvath

Tony Battaglia use's a snap pitch app on his cell phone to video his son 9 year-old son Tony, a Moosic Little League pitcher during a recent workout. Butch Comegys / Staff Photographer Story by Horvath Tony Battaglia use's a snap pitch app on his cell phone to video his son 9 year-old son Tony, a Moosic Little League pitcher during a recent workout. Butch Comegys / Staff Photographer Story by Horvath Tony Battaglia use's a snap pitch app on his cell phone to video his son 9 year-old son Tony, a Moosic Little League pitcher during a recent workout. Butch Comegys / Staff Photographer Story by Horvath

A Moosic man’s app may offer answers to a sandlot debate as old as baseball itself: Whose pitch has more zip?

“Snap Pitch,” developed by Tony Battaglia and launched in the App Store June 22, turns an iPhone or iPad into a radar gun — allowing baseball and softball players, coaches, fans and scouts to determine how fast a pitched or thrown ball travels. Battaglia, a computer teacher at Scranton High School and father of three young ballplayers, is selling the app in the App Store for $1.99.

Created using Xcode, a program used to make apps for Apple platforms, Snap Pitch accesses the device’s camera and records video of a pitch being thrown. Users then watch the video in slow motion and mark the exact moment when the pitch is released and when it reaches its target.

The app calculates pitch speed in miles per hour using time and distance — for example, the 60-feet, 6-inches between a major league mound and home plate. Moreover, a user can adjust the distance element to determine pitch speed between any two points, making the app applicable at every level of the game.

“I made (Snap Pitch) ... first of all to see if I could do it,” Battaglia said, donning a Moosic Little League ball cap. “When I saw how well it actually worked, I’m like: ‘maybe I can actually develop this and put it onto the market.’ The people I’ve shown it to all seem to like it, especially the kids when they get to see themselves in slow motion and it has the speed there that pops up.”

While Battaglia’s grandfather founded the popular Scranton sporting goods store of the same name, his family sold the business years ago. Outside of his recent foray into app development and App Store entrepreneurship, Battaglia has no formal business experience — but his app is selling.

While he’s yet to get a first financial report detailing exactly how many copies of the app sold, Battaglia estimates that he sells about five to 10 copies a day through the App Store. He receives 85 percent of the proceeds on each sale, and, outside of a one-time $99 charge to get the app listed in the App Store, has no overhead.

He hasn’t marketed the product extensively yet, but hopes to.

“I contacted someone at the Little League World Series, which is coming up next month, and I was seeing if I could get ... a vending spot down there,” Battaglia said. “Those are the people I’d like to market to the most. ... These little kids who are coming up and want to improve on their game and want to know what they’re throwing, I think that’s the main market I would try to hit.”

Keith Yurgosky, business consultant with the University of Scranton Small Business Development Center, applauded this approach, but also suggested advertising on websites and forums frequented by the app’s target audience — like high school and travel sports sites in this case.

Along with serving as a radar gun, Battaglia sees the product as a tool to teach good pitching mechanics. With the app, coaches can analyze a pitcher’s delivery in slow motion to determine, for example, which arm angle or release point results in more velocity, or use it to gauge the speed of a catcher’s throw down to second base.

When compared at a recent RailRiders game to the PNC Field radar gun, Battaglia’s app held up, sometimes being right on the money, while other times being off by only a mile an hour or so.

Contact the writer:

jhorvath@timesshamrock.com; 570-348-9141;

@jhorvathTT on Twitter

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